SOSP: A SmartNIC-based Offloading Framework for Cloud Storage Pooling

Abstract

As Moore's Law is gradually reaching its limitation, traditional CPU-centric computing architecture cannot meet the ever growing computational requirements, especially in large distributed data centers. There is a growing consensus in the industry that the future architecture is a data-centric fabric which can better integrate the function of computation, storage and network. In order to reduce the pressure on CPUs in data centers and further facilitate the transformation of the entire architecture towards higher flexibility and efficiency, this paper presents a SmartNIC-based offloading framework for storage pooling (SOSP) by leveraging the functionality of SmartNICs to offload both the local and remote storage services from CPUs. Our experiments show that the SmartNIC-based solution SOSP can increase the I/O random Read/Write operation performance by around 20-25% and 13-15% respectively, and at the meantime, free up host CPU cores by saving 16.7% virtual cores compared to the solution without using SmartNICs.